Since
President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden would likely have 15 minutes
or less to respond to an impending attack from a country like China,
Russia or North Korea before the United States could be wiped out by
nuclear-tipped missiles, the military aide who carries the satchel is
supposed to accompany the two leaders wherever they go.

When they board Air Force One or Air Force Two, the military aide carrying the football can be seen right behind them. Staying over at hotels, the military aide sleeps in a room adjoining the president's or vice president's room.

When
Secret Service agents script an arrival or departure from a hotel or
office building, they make sure the military aide rides the elevator
with the protectee. In motorcades, the military aide travels in the
vehicle right behind the president's or vice president's limo.

In
the event the president or vice president comes under attack during a
public appearance, Secret Service agents have standing instructions to
evacuate the military aide together with the protectee.

'Whoever
has the duty as military aide to the president is responsible for
physical custody of the football and ensuring its access to the
president 24/7, within a matter of seconds,' says retired Navy vice
admiral John Stufflebeem, who was the military aide to President George
HW Bush....

Stufflebeem
revealed how the nuclear football works for my book The First Family
Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents.

After
President Harry Truman ordered the release of the first atomic bomb,
President Dwight Eisenhower, as a former general, recognized the need to
provide the president with a mechanism for ordering an immediate
nuclear retaliatory strike from any location.

Under
what is called the National Security System, five military aides rotate
the duty of carrying the nuclear football for the president. The
Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, and Coast Guard each assign an aide.
Another five military aides take turns traveling with the vice
president.

When
the president is in the Oval Office, the military aide with the nuclear
football remains just outside, ready to rush in if the National
Security System signals an alert through phones contained in the
football.

At
night, the military aide sleeps in workout clothes in an underground
bunker at the White House. If an alert comes, he can rush to provide the
president with the football in his bedroom at the residence.

The
vice president has the same arrangement at his offices in the West Wing
and in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and at the vice
president's residence on the grounds of the US Naval Observatory in
northwest Washington.

Only the
president - or if he has died or is incapacitated, the vice president as
his constitutional successor - can order the release of nuclear
weapons.

A former military officer with knowledge of NCA procedures helps fill in some of the details.

Let's
say that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) detects
an inbound air warning; the NMCC immediately calls the Sit Room or the
military aide, which plugs in the President, who then provides an
alpha-numeric code to verify his identity. Once verified, the President
can (to invoke ICBM language) execute or terminate sorties. The military
aide--known as the Milaide--goes everywhere with the President. Even
when the President travels in a hotel elevator, the Milaide (and the
president's doctor) accompany him. (Yes, every POTUS elevator trip is
monitored.)

So what happens if the President doesn't have his identifier?

The commander in chief of NORAD resorts to the next person the NCA list, the Vice President.

This
is a survival mechanism built in during the Cold War, in the event that
Washington was decapitated without warning in a nuclear strike. NORAD
continues down the list until it finds a capital P-Principle, who
provides that identifier and assumes the duties of the Commander in
Chief.

Sounds like no big deal, right?

Here's the
reality: Losing that identifier card had the potential to create a vast
disruption in nuclear command and control procedures.

So Al Gore
gets "the call" because Clinton can't properly ID himself. Gore is
confused, lives in Washington, knows the President is fine. He tells
NORAD to hold while he tracks down the President, who can't verify his
own identify anyway. Precious minutes (and I do mean precious, seconds
count in the nuke business) are lost while civilian and military
leadership sort things out.

And that says nothing of the fact
that the President would be in gross violation of his duties by allowing
the VP to execute an order that is lawfully the President's to make.
Once a strike is authorized by the NCA, the Chairman and Vice Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pass the order to the U.S. Strategic
Command through the NMCC, or through an alternate command site, like
Site R in Liberty Township, PA, or through an airborne platform known as
TACAMO, which stands for "Take Charge and Move Out."

TACAMO's
fleet, operated by the Navy, consists of tricked-out Boeing E6-B
aircraft pre-positioned at six locations across the country. They're on
constant stand-by, ready to fly within 10 minutes of an alert. During
the Cold War, the code name for these missions was "Looking Glass," and
at least one airplane was in the air at all times. TACAMO planes are in
24/7 contact with America's fixed ballistic missile silos, its nuclear
subs, and its nuclear-weapon-equipped airplanes.

Don't confuse
these aircraft with the NAOC, or "Kneecap," four Air Force planes
designed to physically transport the NCA -- POTUS or whomever -- to
safety in an emergency. Wherever the President travels, a Boeing E4 is
not far behind. The planes also ferry other members of the NCA,
including SecDef, to international locations where they know they can
secure their communications if they need them.

If there's a
catastrophic attack on the seat of the United States government, the
planes, their crews, and special mission units are responsible for
ensuring that the surviving constitutional officer "becomes" the NCA
until the emergency is over. The NAOC planes keep in constant contact
with the NMCC, the White House's Presidential Emergency Operations
Center, the HMX-1 squadron that the President uses for helicopter
traffic, and various classified alternate command and control centers
worldwide. (Yes, worldwide.)

On 9/11, according to Shelton, a
NAOC plane was in the air, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
was evacuated to Site R, and various other continuity of government
measures were put into effect in case they were needed. That day, they
were not.

Journalist Ronald Kessler reported, an actual nuclear button does not exist. Instead
there is a “nuclear football,” a “leather-covered titanium business
case that weighs 40 pounds,” he wrote. The football is secured with a
cipher lock.
Bill Clinton had access to this “nuclear football” while
serving as president and in his second term in the White House, as
retired U.S. general Hugh Shelton claimed, Bill’s required codes went
missing…for months!

Shelton emphasized in his book, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, this was “a big deal” and that the United Stated dodged a “silver bullet” when nothing went wrong.

“If our survival depended on launching a preemptive strike, without
the president’s having [the football and authentication codes], such a
strike would be impossible,” Shelton said.

Clinton specifically lost the personal identification code needed to
confirm nuclear launches, also known as the “biscuit.” Without the
“biscuit” the president cannot initiate a launch order or confirm one
from someone else. As The Atlanticreported, “losing that identifier card had the potential to create a
vast disruption in nuclear command and control procedures.”

July 2016, Hillary Clinton speaking at the Democrat convention says how scary it would be if Trump was "entrusted" with nuclear weapons.No mention how scary it was that we "entrusted" nuclear power to her husband Bill and were betrayed.Instead of admitting Bill's gross incompetence and dishonesty to the American people and retiring from the public stage, he and Mrs. Clinton have gone on to make millions and to push for a total of 16 years in the White House:

The USC Dornsife/LA Times Presidential Election "Daybreak" Poll is part of the ongoing Understanding America Study: (UAS) at the University of
Southern California’s (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, in partnership with the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics
and the Los Angeles Times.
Every day, we invite one-seventh of the members of the UAS election
panel to answer three predictive questions:
What is the percent chance that… (1) you will vote in the presidential
election? (2) you will vote for Clinton, Trump, or someone else? and
(3) Clinton, Trump or someone else will win? As their answers come in,
we update the charts daily (just after midnight) with an average of
all of the prior week’s responses. To find out more about what lies
behind the vote, each week we also ask respondents one or two extra
questions
about their preferences and values. The team responsible for the USC
Dornsife/LA Times Presidential Election Poll four years ago developed
the
successful RAND Continuous Presidential Election Poll, which was based
on the same methodology."

But in advance of her trip, Mrs Clinton called the US-China relationship the world's most important of the 21st century.

"Some
believe that China on the rise is, by definition, an adversary," she
said last week. "To the contrary, we believe that the United States and
China can benefit from and contribute to each other's successes."

Jim McGregor, who runs the JL
McGregor research company in Beijing and used to head the American
Chamber of Commerce in China, said that where US leaders once came to
Beijing to hand out lectures, now they came to "kiss up"
."The
power relationship between the United States and China has shifted
greatly over the last ten years and dramatically over the last three
months," he said. "America needs China badly right now."

China
announced in advance that it was willing to resume the military dialogue
with the Pentagon it suspended over US arms sales to Taiwan last
October.

Her harsh words for North Korea may be intended to reassure America's closest regional allies, South Korea and Japan.

Some
Japanese officials are uneasy at the growing rapport with Tokyo's old
rival China, while even Washington's stance on Pyongyang has recently
sounded more conciliatory than either Japan's or South Korea's.

In
1995, when Mrs Clinton attended an international women's conference in
Beijing, she offended her hosts by criticising their one-child policy,
among other human rights complaints."...

Opposition to this establishment
consensus has been advancing, by fits and starts, and is now too large
to be ignored....

On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy,these voters are nationalist, not
globalist—they would limit America’s intervention in foreign conflicts
and subject the importation of products and people from the rest of the
world to a more rigorous is-it-good-for-us test. (And by “us” they mean
themselves, not the Fortune 500.) By nominating Trump, the Republican
Party has finally been forced to come to terms with these sentiments,
choosing a candidate who is largely disdainful of the globalist
consensus of GOP donors, pundits, and think-tank experts. For Trump and
his voters, the “Reaganite” basket of so-called “conservative”
issues—free trade, high immigration, tax cuts for those with high
incomes and entitlement cuts for the middle class—was irrelevant or
actually undesirable.

Meanwhile the Democrats under Hillary
Clinton have solidified their identity asa party of America’s top and
bottom, revolving around the dual axis of urban coastal elites who
benefit from their ties to a global economy and poorer ethnic
minorities. The Clinton wing of the Democrats defends the free trade
deals and has now joined much of the hard left in opposing meaningful
enforcement of America’s immigration laws. (Before his campaign started,
Bernie Sanders assailed open-borders advocacy as a right-wing “Koch
Brothers” argument, but the logic of his party’s politics drove him to
embrace amnesty and non-enforcement.) On the left, the argument that
national boundaries are themselves, like racism or sexism, an arbitrary
and unjust form of discrimination is made with growing frequency. During
their debates, both Clinton and Sanders expressed support for an
amnesty-based immigration reform and opposed the deportation of migrants
who had not committed crimes here....

“Border
wars” have replaced “culture wars” as the critical dividing line between
the parties....

In one form or another, this
nationalist-versus-globalist division is being reproduced in almost
every country in the West facing the pressure of working-class decline
and mass immigration. Given the opportunity, most European voters have
consistently resisted ceding greater powers to the EU, but their votes
have had little impact. Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader who now
heads most French presidential polls, mocks France’s President Hollande
by referring to him as Angela Merkel’s vice chancellor, a functionary
permitted to administer “the province of France.” Throughout Europe,
right-wing nationalist parties are rising in the polls against
establishment coalitions unable to preserve either the economic gains
won by past generations or public safety in migrant-dominated urban
areas.

Trump is obviously part of this pan-Western nationalist/populist wave, and may be the first to break
through in a major Western country. But even if he loses, he will have
transformed the Republican Party. Because the Democratic coalition,
perhaps now best exemplified bythe twin poles of Goldman Sachs and
Black Lives Matter, is inherently unstable, there is every likelihood
that a more conventional politician, making use of Trump’s basket of
issues, will again win the GOP nomination and eventually the presidency."...

"What Trump needs to do to trounce Clinton in the next presidential debate."

The media's excitement over Hillary successfully "baiting" Trump is
revealing -- of the media, of what this election is really about, and of
what Trump needs to do now.

The definition of Trump "taking the bait" was getting him to talk about
himself, not about issues. This from a media that claim to be aching
for "policy specifics."

Hillary -- with assists from the moderator -- "baited" Trump on how
rich he is, the loan from his father, a lawsuit in 1972, the birther
claims, who he said what to about the Iraq War from 2001 to 2003, and so
on.

Trump was winning when he talked about the heinous trade deals that
have shipped jobs abroad and immiserated millions of Americans -- which
Hillary supports. He was winning when he talked about bringing order and
safety to black neighborhoods overrun with crime; Hillary’s with the
criminals. He was winning when he talked about rebuilding our inner
cities, instead of saying, "Vote for me!" then, "See you in four years!"
-- as Hillary does.

It's almost impossible not to correct a lie, especially about yourself,
which is why Hillary and Lester Holt's "baiting" strategy was to make
outrageous claims about Trump.
Hillary, for example, criticized Trump for not releasing his tax
returns, saying, "maybe ... he's paid nothing in federal taxes."

This is exactly what Sen. Harry Reid stated as hard fact about Romney
in 2012 -- on the Senate floor, so he couldn't be sued. After the
election was over, Reid was asked about this obvious falsehood. He
laughed it off and said, "Romney didn't win, did he?"

Everybody agrees he’s got the job. It's too late for Hillary to be sucking up to the hiring committee, reminding them, but
I took driver's ed seven times -- yes, there were mistakes, but I was
grilled for 11 hours about that vehicular homicide. Also, the Russians
hacked my GPS.

Trump showed up at the debate with his driver's license. That's all anyone needed to see."

Both are indicative of why the disaster in the Middle East can only
get worse. The problem with an “intelligence surge” is twofold: (1) it’s
not clear what it’s supposed to do beyond undermining civil liberties
in the name of anti-terrorism and (2) whatever information it turns up
will only be as good as the people who use it. Stalin had excellent
sources warning him in 1941 that a German attack was imminent. But since
some said the attack would occur in April, he was able to ignore them
once April came and went and stick with his original conclusion that
Hitler would not attack at all.

But what she ignores is that doing so only makes matters worse. The
record is clear. Seventeen days after killing Bin Laden in May 2011,
Barack Obama braggedabout the “huge blow” that Al Qaeda had just suffered, saying: “even
before his death, Al Qaeda was losing its struggle for relevance, as the
overwhelming majority of people saw that the slaughter of innocents did
not answer their cries for a better life. By the time we found Bin
Laden, Al Qaeda’s agenda had come to be seen by the vast majority of the
region as a dead end, and the people of the Middle East and North
Africa had taken their future into their own hands.”

Al Qaeda was stronger than ever. The only thing killing Bin Laden
accomplished was to remove a leader who was a bit out of touch and allow
even more aggressive jihadis to take his place. Gaddafi was a bit
different: rather than a holy warrior, he was an anti-mujahedeen who, in
a February 2011 phone call,
tried to warn Great Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair that the
pro-Al Qaeda forces seeking his ouster “want to control the
Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe.”

Al Baghdadi is a bad guy whom no rational person would miss. But
bumping him off will be just as ineffective as killing bin
Laden. Indeed, we already have an idea of who his successor would be,
and it’s not pretty.

According to an article by Giorgio Cafiero in the well-informed Al-Monitor website, it’s Turki al-Binali,
an influential 32-year-old cleric from the island kingdom of Bahrain
who is seen as a rising force within ISIS and who may have authored the
bizarre fatwa allowing ISIS soldiers to take captured Yazidi women as
sex slaves.

If al-Binali takes over, Cafiero says that it “would mark a major
transfer of authority from the old vanguard of global jihadists to a
younger and more puritanical one.” The changeover would have a
particularly “toxic effect” on Bahrain and other Arab Gulf states where
young people are “vulnerable to the dark trap of radicalization.”

Instead of radiating outwards from the Persian Gulf in other words,
al-Binali’s accession could conceivably cause jihadism to reverse course
so that it flows back in. The upshot could be an eruption of ISIS-style
terrorism right under the nose of the U.S. Fifth Fleet anchored at a
$2-billion naval base on Bahrain’s Manama Harbor.

U.S. policies make this more likely than not. Bahrain is a deeply polarized society, torn between a 60-percent Shi‘ite majority that has suffered some15,000 arrests
since the government called in Saudi troops in March 2011 to help crush
Arab Spring protests and a Sunni minority that enjoys a virtual
political monopoly under the al-Khalifa family dictatorship.

What makes matters even worse is the monarchy’s policy of importing
Sunnis from places like Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Pakistan – an
estimated 100,000 over the last decade – granting them citizenship, and
then using them to staff its security forces and bolster the Sunni
population in general.

Since the “New Bahrainis” are recruited for the express purpose of
bashing Shi‘ites, the effect is to strengthen Sunni militancy and drive
up tensions another notch.Since the island kingdom is dependent on U.S.
military protection,it has tried to ingratiate itself with Washingtonby sending jet fighters to bomb ISIS positions in Syria.

But when Islamic State launched a blitzkrieg across eastern Iraq in
mid-2014, top officials could barely contain their glee. Finally, they
said, militant Sunnis were striking back at an Iraqi government in
Baghdad that, with typical sectarian paranoia, they see as an arm of the
international Shi‘ite conspiracy no less than the Baathist regime in
Damascus, Syria.

Even while denouncing ISIS as a “deviated cult,” Foreign Minister Khalid al-Khalifa therefore tweeted
his suspicion that America was using the group as an excuse to attack
Sunnis. Minister of Information Sameera Rajab chimed in that rather than
an eruption of terrorism, the ISIS offensive represented a Sunni
uprisingagainst Shi‘ite oppression.

“ISIS is a name,” she said, “that is being thrown around in the media
as a cover-up to silence the will of the Iraqi people for freedom and
dignity.” What the U.S. called terrorism was really “a revolution
against the injustice and oppression that has reigned over Iraq for more
than ten years.”

ISIS despises the (Bahrain) al-Khalifa family not only because the monarchy
bombs their positions in Syria, but because it allows alcohol and other
sinful Western practices and merely jails Shi‘ite protesters rather than
killing them outright. The more the regime tries to meet ISIS halfway,
the angrier the group grows.

Clinton has been no less reckless with regard to Syria. She beat Obama to the punch in calling for Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, she’s consistently pushed for stepped-up support for the rebels, and, as recently as April, she reiterated her call for a “no-fly zone” even though it would require massive military intervention and would almost certainly mean a confrontation with Russia....

Since U.S. foreign policy directly affects 20 times more people than
domestic – i.e. seven billion versus 322 million – then there’s no doubt
as to whom the “lesser-evilism” award goes to. It goes to Trump....

Rather
than polls, what matters at this point are politics, i.e. a sense of
the candidates’ relative ideological strengths and weaknesses. And it’s
in this regard that Clinton is more vulnerable than her backers
apparently realize.

Clueless Candidate

Her speech
in Cleveland following the June 12 Orlando massacre is a good
example why. She began – inappropriately in view of the tragic
circumstances – with the usual glib shout-outs to local pols:

“I want to thank your extraordinary senator, Sherrod Brown, for his
leadership. …I want to thank your congresswoman, Marcia Fudge, who is
both indomitable and indefatigable….I want to acknowledge the mayor,
Mayor Jackson, who was here, County Executive Budish….”

It’s the kind of thing that Clinton can do in her sleep, and it
sounds like it too, i.e. robotic and impersonal.When she got to
the serious stuff, the clichés only multiplied:

“This is a moment when all Americans need to stand together … we must
attack it [i.e. terrorism] with clear eyes, steady hands, unwavering
determination, and pride in our country and our values…the barbarity
that we face from radical jihadists is profound…”

Once again, the effect was thoughtless and frozen. But then came something truly bizarre:

“Now, the third area that demands attention is preventing
radicalization and countering efforts by ISIS and other international
terrorist networks to recruitin the United States and Europe.For
starters, it is long past time for the Saudis, the Qataris and the
Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist
organizations.And they should stop supporting radical schools and
mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path
towards extremism.”

Why bizarre? Simply becauseClinton has been a national figure for
two decades as First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State, yet
this was a rare recognition that there was something wrong
with the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Otherwise, there has been almost
nothing but praise. When the State Department negotiated a record
$60-billion arms deal with Riyadh in 2010, for instance, her officials stated
(somewhat redundantly) that the sale would benefit the Middle East “by
deepening our security relationship with a key partnerwith whom we’ve
enjoyed a solid security relationshipfor nearly seventy years.”How do you have a solid security relationship with a country that
funds extremist mosques that function as a terrorist breeding ground?

When King Abdullah died in January 2015, she and her husband put out a statement praising the Saudi monarch “for his support of efforts for peace in the
Middle East” and “the kingdom’s humanitarian efforts around the
world.” Since when do you advance the cause of peace by funding Al
Qaeda?

To be fair, Clinton was surprisingly frank – once. In December 2009, she wrote in a State Departmentmemo:

Trump can be counted on to hammer at such themes, and the more
he does, the more voters will want to know. Indeed, Trump followed up
her remarks in Cleveland by posting
a few hours later on Facebook: “Crooked Hillary says we must call on
Saudi Arabia and other countries to stop funding hate. I am calling on
her to immediately return the $25 million plus she got from them for the
Clinton Foundation!”

Actually, the problem is worse since, if one includes other Gulf
states such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as well
as high-ranking businessmen, the amount of Persian Gulf money flowing to
the Clinton family foundation is not $25 million, but anywhere from $51 million to $75 million.
That’s a lot of dough. So voters will want to know whether Clinton
intentionally held off criticizing the Gulf monarchies because she
wanted them to fork over as soon as she stepped down as Secretary of
State and that she is only doing so now because the money is in the bag
and there is nothing to lose.

"Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machinehave
begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of
Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S.
intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups theyhave financed and trainedin the bitter five-year-old civil war.

In
mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of
Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of
Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from
Kurdish-controlled areas to the east....

“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-Burbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who
described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new
phenomenon.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said....

The CIA, meanwhile, has its own operations center inside Turkey from
which it has been directing aid to rebel groups in Syria, providing them
with TOWantitank missiles from Saudi Arabian weapons stockpiles.

“Fighting over territory in Aleppo demonstrateshow difficult it is for
the U.S. to manage these really localized and in some cases entrenched
conflicts,” said Nicholas A. Heras, an expert on the Syrian civil war at
the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington.
“Preventing clashes isone of the constant topics in the joint
operations room with Turkey.”...

The clashes brought the U.S. and Turkish officials to “loggerheads,”
he added. After diplomatic pressure from the U.S., the militia withdrew
to the outskirts of the town as a sign of good faith, he said.

“Once
they cross the border into Syria, you lose a substantial amount of
control or ability to control their actions,” Jeffrey White, a former
Defense Intelligence Agency official, said in a telephone interview.
“You certainly have the potential for it becoming a larger problem as
people fight for territory and control of the northern border area in
Aleppo.”" map, LA Times Graphics